India is a civilisation and not a Nation in the sense Europe evolved the notion of nation states after the collapse of Papal power. Both Tagore and Gandhi had realised this during the struggle for freedom in India. In his Hind Swaraj Gandhi thought that 'modern western civilization' was evil and our struggle for freeing ourselves from British rule should be a struggle to free even Britain from its bondage to the notions of modern civilisation. After what we have seen of the failure of the Soviet Union and the avaricious culture of modern China, and the globalising India we have come to realise that concentration of power in any form is evil, and we need not reject wholesale the great ideas of anarchist thinking that is seen in visionary thinkers like Tolstoy and Gandhi. They believed in self regulating small communities, largely rural communities in the case of Gandhi, for human kind to be creative and live in harmony with Nature.

'Nehru was basically a' cosmopolitan' thinker attracted emotionally to Gandhian dreams. Smaller, language based, states enjoying a certain degree of autonomy, was closer to the Panchayat Raj ideal of Gandhi. Yet Nehru, in his dream of a strong India- 'strong' in the western sense- was opposed to the creation of linguistic states. But Nehru was a genuine democrat he had to yield to the demand of linguistic states. The 'cosmopolitan' Indian English educated class was sceptical of universal suffrage and also of linguistic states. They have a ready made vocabulary to denigrate the dream and desire for smaller self regulating community based state power. We know those words- 'narrow-minded' 'chauvinistic' and so on. I must point out here that in my thinking a cosmopolitan thinker is Euro-centred whereas the community based thinker is an organic intellectual and a Universalist.

A few years ago the BBC sought me out to ask me in their innocent perplexity whether it was true that our state Karnataka (with a globalised IT city like Bangalore) was going to make Kannada compulsory in the state. I replied in an equally feigned perplexity 'was it true that English was compulsory in England and French in France?

In India we have realised that if we over centralise there is a danger that we may Balkanise. Examples of Tamilnadu at one time, Assam even now, are examples for such movements and violent agitations. Our civilisation is based on three principles. They are 1) Democracy 2) Secularism and 3) Fedaralism. When Indiraji was in power she tried to belittle Fedaralism and put her own henchmen in power in all the states and the 'High Command' became more 'high' than people could bear. Movements appeared in Punjab for separation. She declared emergency and thus belittled democracy and she paid a heavy Price. In recent years BJP tried to change the 'secular' nature of our polity and despite 'India shining' slogan they lost power.

We are searching for ways to remain a civilisation with pluralities of culture, and formation of linguistic states was one such step. But we must realise, for instance, that even Karnataka is a mini-India and in an over all ambiance of Kannada language culture other linguistic cultures in Karnataka- our own languages like Tulu, Konkani, Kodava, and Urdu- should not feel alien in our land. This is true for almost all other Indian linguistic states.